Mississippi Cotton (18 page)

“I jus’ got to readin’ stories about Jefferson Davis and some of those old Confederates,” said BB. “Jeff Davis’ whole plantation system was about teachin’ slaves what it meant to be free men.”

“Huh?” I had never heard a colored man talk like BB. He talked about Jefferson Davis like we talked about baseball.

“Well, Mr. Davis taught ‘em how to take charge of properties. He said that their best chance for freedom was in learnin’ how to compete with whites in economic things.” BB made it sound like President Davis was a football coach and he was one of his players or something.

He told us about the Confederate constitution and how it was the first one in America to stop slaves from being imported. He knew more than I had ever heard even from my school teachers. I wondered where he had learned all these economic things.

I knew that the War Between the States wasn’t about slavery. It was about things like tariffs and federalism and states’ rights and stuff like that, my parent’s told me. And that I would understand more when I got older. As far as I knew, colored people—well, they were just some very sad people who were slaves once. And after the War they weren’t slaves anymore, mostly because Yankee soldiers took over everything in the South and told the slaves they were free. My daddy said that meant free to be used by the politicians.

“If you had been a slave, would you have run away, BB?” I asked.

“I don’t know what I’d done a hundred ago, Mr. Jake. Nobody does. Lots of people talk about what they would’ve done a long time ago when things were different. They like to talk big, like they would have knowed as much about what everyone thought was right and wrong then as they do now. Maybe I’d run off, maybe not, can’t really say.”

“But you wouldn’t wanna be a slave now, would you?” Taylor asked.

BB wiped his forehead then looked up at the sun. “Well, Mr. Taylor, I am a slave right now. So are you. We’re slaves to this here cotton field. I got to work or I don’t eat. You got to work or you’ll get a whippin’.” BB laughed, and we all laughed with him. “But I guess I wouldn’t want to be tol’ I couldn’t come and go as I pleased,” he added. “At least not by no mortal.”

“Whadaya mean?” I asked.

He looked surprised. “I mean, I could be told by the Lord.”

“No, no. I meant about being a slave to the cotton field,” said Taylor.

He took off his hat and ran his hand over the top of his head. Then he wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “Well this here land’s a gift. And the hard work that comes with it’s a gift. And we are slaves, workin’ for it to produce. We are helpin’ it. It’s kinda the way the Lord works. He gives you something so you can give back summin’ of yourself. You see, slavery ain’t summin’ the Lord don’t know about. It jus’ summin’ that He don’t like when it’s hard bondage like the Pharoah did in the Bible.”

“Yeah, the Pharoah was bad on the slaves in Egypt,” Casey blurted, quick to show he had listened in Sunday School.

“Is that why colored people sing Go Down Moses a lot?” Taylor asked.

“Well, I s’pose so.”

“Why did you read books about Jefferson Davis?” I asked.

Taylor and Casey and I had started eating now. BB pulled a sandwich wrapped in wax paper out of his sack. He still seemed like he was hesitating—like he wanted to tell us, but something was holding him back.

“I met this fellow in the Army. An ol’ master sergeant. He was from North Carolina and he was about as mean as he could be. He was mean to everybody. There were some boys from both North and South that didn’t want colored people in the same outfits as whites. And they let us know it, too. You see, us colored people didn’t mix in the Army ‘til Mr. Truman put out an order to start doin’ it. And lots of folks didn’t like it. But this sergeant didn’t put up with some of these boys, and more’n once he chewed on their backsides.”

I knew that colored people sat in different places on the bus in Jackson, and they had their own picture shows, but I thought it was just the way things had always been and would always be. I never thought about the Army and colored people being in it. “What about the University Grays BB? You still haven’t told us about them,” I asked.

“I’m comin’ to that.” For another moment he said nothing, pausing to peel the shell from the soft white egg. Another pause, a sprinkle of salt.

“So this ol’ sergeant knew I was havin’ a hard time being the only colored man in the outfit. He called me aside one day wearing a bad look on his face. I was afraid I was about to get chewed out for something or other. But he started tellin’ me about a man by the name of McElroy who had written a book about Jefferson Davis. Said if I had any guts I’d read it. It was in the library, and if I knew how to read and write I could prob’ly get a library card.” BB paused to take a bite of egg. “That was the only time I believe I saw that man smile.”

“You mean, he didn’t think you could read and write?”

BB laughed.

“So you read the book?” Casey said.

“Yessir, Mr. Casey. I did indeed. The last time a man recommended a book to me was your granddaddy, and the book was written by Booker T. Washington. I never regretted readin’ it either. I tried to get some other colored fellows to read it.”

“Did they?” Taylor asked.

“Naaa. Maybe one or two. Not many,” he said. “I thought maybe if more people read it, then colored and white people would have more to talk about than the price of cotton and where the fish were biting.

“When I read
Up From Slavery
, —that was the book he giv’ me—I could tell that there was a difference between black folks as slaves before the War and black folks after they were freed after the War. You could tell that something had changed between colored people and white people after the War ended. So I started reading other books about the War and about what happened after it was over.”

He leaned back against the trunk of the tree and took a big bite of his sandwich. “The colored people wanted to be free, but kinda like Mr. Booker T. said, it was one thing to be free, something else to know how to survive. So in their free condition, Yankee carpetbaggers and Southern scalawags used them, and it ended up with most whites in the South bein’ real bitter against the colored people.”

“Why were they bitter, BB?” Taylor asked.

“Well, the Southern people and the Yankee people, too, always thought that God had made the colored folks somewhat underneath them. But the Southern people saw it as kinda like a parent taking care of their children. So when the carpetbaggers and scalawags looted and stole and gave it to the free black men, the Southern white folks felt betrayed.

“And I thought that was pretty bad. I mean the Southern white people always treated the colored people better than the Yankees treated them; at least that’s what I found out from being in the Army.”

“Even though they’d been slaves?” Casey asked.

BB wadded up his wax paper and put it in his sack. He picked up the egg shells and put them in, too. “Well, the truth is, the Yankee slave traders was the ones that brought them over here in the first place. But they didn’t see nothin’ wrong with it. They were jus’ buyin’ people from Africa that had been made slaves by other colored people in Africa. Lots of them got sold to North and South at first, but pretty soon the North didn’t have no more use for them and they sold most of them to South America and Cuba and other places way, way south. The South bought a lot of ’em for work in the fields. Better to have been a slave in the South than in Brazil or somewhere down there. Down there nobody cared, and they would jus’ get worked to death.”

“Why didn’t the North have any use for them?” Casey asked.

“Well, they didn’t have rich land that us Southerners did. And they saw themselves as traders and industry folks. Any farms they had were small and weren’t goin’ to have much future for them. So they sold them to Southern folks who needed the help.”

“You learned all this after you got in the army, BB?” I asked.

“Well, mostly. I guess I found out in the army that it didn’t matter whether white boys North or South wanted to be with me. I found out I was fightin’ for my home. And my home was Mississippi. And I wanted to be with some Mississippi boys, Southern boys. And it made me think about Johnny Vaught and how he tried to get as many Mississippi boys as he could for his teams. His Rebel teams. His University Grays.”

“But you said none of the white boys North or South wanted to be with you,” Casey blurted.

“That’s right, Mr. Casey. But white Southern boys didn’t want to be with me cause their mommas and daddies had told them about how the scalawags and carpetbaggers had used black folk to beat down the white folks. Northern white boys didn’t wanna be with me ‘cause they just didn’t like black folks.”

Taylor handed me his and Casey’s garbage, and I wadded it up and put it in my sack. “You’ve sure read a lot, BB,” I said. “You should’ve gone to college instead of war.”

“Well, I jus’ wanted the white folks to know I could fight for my land, too. And my land is Mississippi, my land is the South. I’m Southern and that’s not black or white, that’s gray. Robert E. Lee wore gray. And so did Stonewall Jackson. And both of those men prayed with colored folks, in church and out. And Jeff Davis sure didn’t fight no war ‘cause he hated blacks. He had an adopted black son.” He winked at us. “Most folks don’t know that.”

“Well—” I started.

“I’ve prob’y said enough now. I need to get back to work anyway. You boys gonna keep swimmin’?” He looked at the sun, and smiled white.

The three of us were sitting Indian style. We were still caught up in BB’s history lesson. We wanted to hear more. I had known colored people since I could remember, and I don’t remember any of them ever being mean. They were just there, and if you knew them, you knew them, if you didn’t, you didn’t. Some were hard working and some were lazy, my daddy said. But I had heard him say that about white people, too.

I had once heard some man at my daddy’s warehouse call a colored man a lazy nigger. I was shuffled along into the office while my daddy said something to the man. Daddy later told me that a lot of people used that word, but it was wrong to say it to a colored person. It was kind of a bullying thing, and the colored person would be hurt and could not really respond. He had said it was an unkindness to say it.

I wanted to ask BB if he had ever been called a nigger. But I didn’t. I knew one thing—he’d never been called a lazy nigger—except maybe by a liar. He was what Cousin Trek had said—the hardest working man you ever saw, white or colored. And he was real smart.

CHAPTER 14

The week passed in a blink. We worked in the field Friday morning; it seemed like the hottest day of the summer. Cousin Trek said it was a hundred and three. We saw The Man from Planet X Friday night and the next chapter of Radar Men from the Moon.

As usual Commando Cody had been about to die and we’d have to wait to see how he would survive. He had been trapped in a cave with a lava flow, caused by the Moon Men melting the mountain. Taylor guessed that he would turn invisible; I guessed he would find an escape cave. Casey said he was going to die.

The Friday night picture show never got too old for us. It was almost an adventure, being somewhere where all your friends were, and everybody wanting to be there. Talking about things that weren’t real, like Commando Cody or Flash Gordon, but we acted like they were. It was like a ball game, and you weren’t positive how it was going to end.

Saturday we worked until noon. Late in the afternoon, we ate watermelon out on the screen porch and sang songs. Big Trek tried to accompany us with his harmonica, but he hit a lot of bad notes—except when we sang Dixie. He knew it well.

That night the grownups tried to show us how to play a new card game called Canasta. But it was hard to catch on, and Casey kept spraying the cards all over the floor when he tried to shuffle. We finally switched to Chinese Checkers.

Sunday we got to church on time, a cardinal rule, and heard the Sunday School lesson about David and Goliath. That was the story about the little shepherd boy, David, who was the least likely guy to be able to do anything about Saul’s enemy, the giant Philistine.

We had all heard the story before, but this was the first time a Sunday School teacher had made such a point that we’d often see God use the most unlikely people for a big job. David just charged out there and killed the giant, Goliath, with a rock and a sling.

Casey said that personally he would have used a hand grenade.

You were supposed to take church more seriously than the picture show but church was fun too, because you got to see a bunch of the guys and talk about whatever we had done Friday and Saturday. We also got to talk about our big fishing trip that afternoon.

After church and the Sunday parking lot talk, we got home and raced inside to change clothes. We collected all of our gear and waited for Mr. Hightower to pick us up to go fishing down the river at Greenville. He had a friend with at least two boats, maybe more. The boats had outboard motors so we would be cruising up and down the mighty Mississippi. Even if we didn’t catch any big catfish ‘as big as a hog,’ Mr. Hightower had said—it would be fun.

“Now y’all do exactly what Mr. Hightower tells you,” Cousin Carol said. “And stay in the boat. That river is dangerous.”

There was something in her voice when she said ‘that river.’ It made me think about the dead man. I guess that the river has taken a lot of bodies in all the time it’s been coming down from Minnesota, or wherever it started, to the Gulf of Mexico.